State Of The Serious Games Industry

The Serious Play Conference offers these takeaways for game and gamification professionals

Last week I attended the Serious Play Conference, one of the premier conferences for practitioners of serious games, for the first time. The other, of course, is Games For Change. If you’ve never been to SPC, you can think of it like Games For Change’s less flashy and more practically-minded sibling. Run by the extremely capable Sue Bohle, the conference had a full schedule full of talks and workshops, and was tightly run with plenty of time for networking and breathers.

The people there were, as a rule, incredibly friendly and helpful, with a sincere desire to share their knowledge and learn from others.

Meanwhile, the content of the conference was revealing to me, especially as a first-time attendee who has been to G4C in the past and knows a bit about the industry. While Games For Change is future-facing, Serious Play Conference is more focused on the present: What is being developed currently? What do we have to share with each other now? How can I make my practice better, today? For this reason, and the wide attendance from many sectors of the field, it offers the best snapshot of the Serious Games movement. Here are my takeaways from the conference, which I believe explains the current state of the industry.

Everyone is excited (and worried) about AI

There were many talks and workshops about generative AI. These included overviews of tools currently on the market, ways to apply AI to game design, methods for creating Unity environments and 3d assets with AI, and many more.

Almost all of these talks and events were full. And even after the conference and during breaks, people breathlessly discussed AI. Those who had experience with these were excited to share their knowledge. Those without soaked it up. And everyone expressed their own ambitions for using it, worries about its effects, and plans to be a part of its adoption going forward.

One speaker confessed that AI had forced him to rethink his own value.

“I used to be the guy who had knowledge. Then I was the guy who had ideas. Now, I don’t know.”

Even at conferences, knowledge is siloed

Although I spoke with many people at the conference, I was somewhat limited by the tracks I attended. Serious Play was separated into six tracks including Health, Skills Training, Higher Ed, K12 Education and others. I saw familiar faces at these talks, but rarely got into deeper discussion. Whenever I did, I discovered something we had to share with each other. This was exciting, but left me with the feeling that there was much more here that I was missing.

Additionally, when I talked with fellow practitioners, I discovered a vast gulf in knowledge, people repeating each others work, and a lack of communication even within agencies. One team that was developing a game for FEMA had no knowledge of my colleague’s work for that same agency, even though they were making games about related topics for the same people!

This highlights a need for even more colaboration between practitioners, and better open sharing of research.

Most serious games are not measured

One of my long standing complaints with the Serious Games movement is a lack of measurement. For decades, the vast majority of serious games were not measured. Although it’s starting to change, for the most part, this continues to be the case.

Many professionals explained their work, showcased finished games, detailed their process, and presented novel research. Sadly, the commonalities between them were:

• Unclear outcomes
• Lack of data
• Too small sample size when measurements happened
• Assumptions of effectiveness only
• Not funded for evaluation

When I asked one speaker about which of their games had the greatest effect on learning, she replied:

“We don’t really measure, but I can tell you my observations.”

Another could not articulate the real world impact intended by his game at all. Later, I was asked during my presentation on playtesting what to do if the company didn’t have the “luxury” of testing more than a couple times.

It seems like a lot of practitioners are building games powered by best intentions, not by any scientific process or proven theory of change. I hope this will change as time goes on and the industry gets the funding to pursue this.

There’s a thirst for practical advice

Of the talks given, most were about work conducted or research in process. Those that were about practical game development advice were well attended, and I went to several of these. However, most of these talks and workshops were actually thin on practical advice and heavy with theory and supposition. The workshops that were most focused on actual doing tended to be experimental, along the lines of “let’s make something right now and see what happens.”

In my talks, I tried to include actual tips, methods that have been tried and I know are effective, and warnings of what not to do. This seemed like a breath of fresh air to those attending, and I saw this thirst for practical advice evidenced repeatedly both in strong attendance of practical talks and the questions offered up to speakers starting with “How” instead of “Why.”

Games For Health Is Growing

One of the fastest growing sectors of serious games is Games For Health. The healthcare industry is presented with many challenges: education, behavior change, and engagement to name a few. Games are well suited to tackle these issues and larger companies are taking notice.

Many of the most successful games presented over the week were health games. Not to mention, these games tended to have real measurements, since Digital Therapeutics (DTx) need to have clinical impact, and the games are often designed at least in part by researchers and doctors.

I saw a lot of innovative work being done on light budgets, and considerable interest from the NIH to sponsor this work as well. If you are a practitioner of serious games looking for a sector that is up and coming, look to health.

No One Is Talking About Web3

I don’t know what the conversation around Web 3 was in the past at Serious Play Conference, but this year no one was talking about it. No one was building games using NFTs. No one was using blockchain in their game, or even explaining it. And of the dozens of talks and presentations, precisely one was about the Metaverse. At least as the Serious Games industry sees it, Web 3 has been a dud. The future lies elsewhere.

Sam Liberty is a serious game and gamification consultant whose games generate data, create knowledge, and modify behavior. He teaches game design at Northeastern University.